Harvard’s Atheist-Chaplain Controversy

At the end of August, the Times ran a story about a Harvard chaplain named Greg Epstein, an avowed atheist and "humanist rabbi," who had been selected by his fellow-chaplains at the university (there are more than thirty of them, of diverse faiths) to serve as their president. Here was an ivory-tower man-bites-dog tale that elicited some context about the ascendancy of secularism, both at a particular institution (one founded, almost four centuries ago, essentially as a seminary) and in the culture at large. "We don't look to a god for answers," Epstein told the paper. "We are each other's answers."